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Explainer: What Vermont’s 'required agricultural practices' do — and what the court ruling changed
Summary
Legislative counsel traced RAPs from 1991 rulemaking through the 2015 Act 64 change, explained what the RAP rule covers (manure management, setbacks, nutrient planning, training, direct-discharge limits) and highlighted legal ambiguities the Vermont Supreme Court's reading introduced for municipalities and farms.
Required agricultural practices (RAPs) in Vermont are management standards adopted by rule and enforced to reduce agricultural pollutants entering the state’s groundwater and surface waters. Legislative counsel Michael Grady briefed the committee on the origin, content and legal stakes for RAPs.
Grady summarized the legal history: RAPs were adopted by rule starting in 1991 and the General Assembly later clarified statutory language in 2015. He said the 2015 action made RAPs explicitly “required,” not merely “accepted,” and that Act 64 set out about a dozen subdivisions the RAPs must address. Those subject areas in the agency rule, Grady said, include manure storage and setbacks, nutrient-management planning, barnyard construction and waste-system management, soil-loss and cover-crop standards, direct-discharge prohibitions, buffer zones and agricultural water-quality training.
Grady emphasized that the agency’s RAP rule also contains provisions that are not strictly about water quality — for example, standards for construction and siting of farm structures and a variance process administered by the Secretary of Agriculture. He told the committee that “The RAPs are more than water.”
On how the state defines who is a farm for purposes of RAPs enforcement, counsel cited numeric thresholds used by the agency in past determinations and gave an example of counts the agency has used: “It's a 100 laying hens, 50 geese, 50 turkeys, a 100 ducks.” Those thresholds were set, Grady said, to prevent enforcement resources from being used to investigate every backyard complaint.
The recent Vermont Supreme Court decision the committee discussed applied a plain-language interpretation that, according to Grady, focused the statutory phrase on nonpoint-source water pollution controls rather than the full universe of the agency’s RAP rule. As a result, several practical questions remain unresolved, such as whether municipalities can regulate composting or enforce noise and hours-of-operation bylaws against farming activities that the court did not view as water-quality practices.
Grady cautioned that administrative steps — for example, having the Agency of Agriculture redefine the RAP rule — could invite litigation. He recommended the General Assembly could also clarify legislative intent through statute, and committee members signaled interest in drafting language to address the ambiguities.
The committee will take agency and stakeholder testimony in subsequent sessions before deciding whether to propose statutory changes.
